I’ve finally finished watching all thirteen parts of Sir Kenneth Clark’s classic series, Civilisation, and am therefore sharing my final thoughts on the series as a whole and on Clark’s strengths and weaknesses as an observer of the history of western civilization.

 

Visitors to the Ink Desk might recall that I was somewhat scathing of Clark’s treatment of the Middle Ages, particularly in his woeful ignorance of scholastic philosophy and its axiomatic place in the unfolding of the Christian vision of civilization. Clark seemed to have no real knowledge of the works or teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. I was also puzzled that his panoramic overview of western civilization began in the dark ages, not in its theological roots in Jerusalem or its philosophical roots in Athens. It strikes me as singularly odd that an overview of western civilization should ignore Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It’s at least as odd that the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Old Testament, or the beauty of the Psalms and the Song of Songs, should be overlooked. And what of the majesty of the Gospels and the teaching of Christ. Surely the whole of western civilization is built on the wisdom of the Word of God and on the teaching and influence of the Church. To ignore the faith and philosophy that forms the foundation upon which everything else is built is a a fatal flaw in Clark’s edifice.

 

Clark’s idiosyncratic commencement in the dark ages also means that he skipped the Fathers of the Church, ignored the seminal place of St. Augustine, and failed to mention Boethius’ Consolatio. This is all odd, to say the least.

 

Another problem is that Clark is primarily an aesthete who has not really clarified what he understands as the basis for aesthetics. He has little Latin and less Greek, i.e. little theology and less philosophy. Thus we are given St. Francis of Assisi but not St. Dominic, a reflection of Clark’s seeming preference for the Franciscan “heart” of the Church over its Dominican head. Indeed, the Dominican ratio seems to be completely over Clark’s head, leaving him puzzled. This is the reason for his almost embarrassed and embarrassing passing over of any real discussion of Thomism and the triteness and banality of his discussion of Dante. A similar triteness and banality characterises his regurgitation of postmodern nonsense in his treatment of Shakespeare.

 

Clark is much better when playing to his strengths, particularly in the discussion of painting, sculpture and architecture, though I wish that he’d made more of the theological underpinnings of gothic architecture. A highlight for me was the labelling of the philosophy of Rousseau as “I feel, therefore I am”, a wonderfully witty encapsulation of Rousseau’s anti-rational and irrational reductionism.

 

The series ends on a high note with Clark’s lament of “our urge to destruction”, reminding us that scientism had given us the horror of the nuclear bomb with its catastrophic and cataclysmic potential, and culminates in the insistence that civilization is the accumulation of the fruits of “God-given genius”.

 

The final verdict on Clark’s seminal celebration of civilization is that he is on the side of the angels without seeming to know it. He does not understand the end of civilization, i.e. its purpose, but is in love with its beauty and sees the virtues of its civilizing attributes. One can see the seeds of Clark’s eventual conversion to Catholicism in his love of the beautiful edifice that Christendom has raised to the glory of man’s indebtedness to God but one wishes that he understood that the beauty of faith is united to reason.